Richard Feynman: Cargo Cult Science (1974)
neurotheory.columbia.edu
neurotheory.columbia.edu
Sometimes I think if we could extend this principle to human communication in general, we'd end up with a lot less misinformation.
I try to communicate doubts or possible weaknesses in my arguments when I can, though it's difficult and I'm sure I've failed to do so on numerous occasions. It occurs to me that perhaps we simply don't have the cognitive capacity to include that level of information in our everyday communications. Still, I wonder if perhaps this should be an ideal to strive for. Information travels so fast now, and it seems like most people aren't very mindful of how they participate in this transmission.
There is an experiment here that can be applied to start ups. Can you predict the success or failure of a start up based on how confident the founder is perceived?
Hedgehogs also beat foxes, despite the obvious difference in prediction accuracy in favor of foxes.
Question everything, discover everything, take nothing for granted.
If it's seems unrealistic, just read the book, it'll just teach you how it happens. If it's intimidating, it's by its ruthless simplicity.
Yeah, tell me about it. I fell into the trap a couple of months ago. I was tasked with porting my company's browser's 2D graphics backend onto Android OpenGL. My first attempt allowed the browser to draw into graphics buffers that I would load into a texture using glTexImage2D.
A few co-workers felt that this was less efficient than the old 2D APIs, where we would draw into a buffer that would be directly read by the blitter hardware, without having to do a load step. I agreed - on the face of it, if we could arrange things to draw into the texture buffer directly we could save memory and processor cycles, so I started hunting on the Internet to see if anyone else had come to the same conclusion.
It turns out that the guys that were developing Firefox for Android had had exactly the same problem, and they hacked together a solution where they used some internal Android APIs for graphic buffers, that they accessed through dlopen/dlsym. They then linked the buffer to an eglImage, and created a texture from the eglImage. I figured that hey, if the Firefox guys are doing it, then it's probably not to bad an idea.
Unfortunately I should have taken the next step in my investigations, and ask myself exactly what that code that created an eglImage and linked it to a texture was actually doing. If I had investigated that more closely, I would have realised that behind the scenes there's an implicit equivalent of glTexImage2D being done - the problem being that the internal format of a texture is not a simple bitmap. The image is tiled so that OpenGL can draw a texture to the screen with any rotation and have roughly the same performance - if you use a standard bitmap layout, memory paging makes drawing tall thin rectangles much slower than drawing wide short rectangles. So, for OpenGL (or at least OpenGL ES) to be able to draw the texture to the screen, it first reads the data in from the eglImage, tiling it as it goes. This is exactly the same workload that you have in glTexImage2D, and it requires you to keep two copies of the buffer - the one you draw into, and the one that has been tiled for OpenGL.
Anyway, it took me about a month to get the eglImage solution to work (apart from everything else, you are exposed to odd behaviour by the graphics libraries of each Android tablet that your code runs on, that you have to write special code to handle, ie it's not very portable as a solution). Once I realised that I wasn't actually gaining anything from the exercise, I had to go and rip out all of that native graphic buffer code, and put back in the original standard texture code. I probably wasted 6 weeks stuffing around with all of this.
Lesson learned - if you are worrying about optimising code, you need to understand what is being done by the compiler / hardware, and it is pointless changing code until you have that understanding. Don't just accept stuff that you read on the Internet, where possible you need to go and look at source code, or official documentation. Anything else is running the risk of cargo-culting.
That's because we're over-sensitive pattern matching machines. This is good because often recognising and learning patterns quickly is extremely important, far more so than some false positives. Our amygdala, for example, responds very quickly to simple patterns ("AAAAH A SNAKE"). Slower processing can then tell us it's actually a stick. The cost of a false positive VS a false negative here are quite clear.
"Cargo Cult X" is always about us recognising a pattern and just blindly following it without understanding the causal links. Our poor (innate) understanding of probabilities means we can't really combine evidence well, but we can pattern match. Worse, because we start to feel like we understand what's happening we don't delve more into the problem. Even worse than that, we start to ignore evidence that doesn't fit the pattern since those examples look like outliers, and we quickly forget how often we've seen them.
As situations get more subtle than "Snake or stick" the costs of being wrong in different ways change massively. A poor understanding of statistics in healthcare can kill significant numbers of people, similarly with economic or political interactions.
Our brains are awful at complex statistics, but to be fair to them if our ancestors had waited for a double blind study on how likely a tiger was to eat you we would be here. Good work brains, but we need to stop listening to you now.
Information on fear responses and the role the amygdala plays:
One important conclusion is that scientists are not more believable than other people. "You should believe me because I am a scientist" is not acceptable answer. That scientist is still a meat-bag, just like you. The entire field of science is built up so we can trust the results of science despite it being done by meat-bags, not because we have created high priests that are more believable.
The part that got me hooked was "he fixes radios by thinking" and then sure enough I learnt a bit of safe-cracking too :-)
His lectures on physics were the most beautiful books sitting on my shelf during my school years(never read them), but in India cool kids aren't supposed to be theoretical physicists... they are supposed to be Engineers..and so here I am...
This article seems to appear every couple of months. Still enjoyable and useful however.
Feynman was a theoretical physicist. Direct exposure to fissile materials in a lab or factory environment is hard enough to reliably correlate with cancer rates[1][2] (we're all exposed to a lot of ionizing radiation over the course of our lives), but Feynman's exposure during the Manhattan project would have been extremely minimal, making any connection to his eventual cancer is virtually impossible.
That's stated pretty explicitly--even for those few most directly exposed in accidents--in the discussion section of the paper you link (which my first linked paper was a followup study to, 20 years later, btw), and it was found to be true in the larger population of nuclear material workers in the second paper (who were, indeed, working in an environment where much more was known about how to control the dangers of what they were working with).
Another important point is to people who don't understand the physics, something not understood "must" be feared, therefore the most dangerous part must have been the physics. However I understand at least some of the chemistry and industrial processes using bulk hydrofluoric scare me more than the physics. Aside from the mechanical / explosive hazards, of course (machine plastic explosives to precise shapes on a milling machine for the implosion weapons, are you insane? You're hooking up a zillion blasting caps to .. what?)
At the first test explosion of an atomic bomb, Feynman was the only scientist who eschewed protective goggles and watched the blast with unshielded eyes — he wanted to see the explosion clearly, and had researched the danger and confidently concluded that the risk to his vision was negligible.
Were cancer rates among those witnesses much higher than in the general population? (Note that the goggles really do nothing when it comes to cancer, so that bit is irrelevant.)
The immediate radiation dose from a nuclear explosion is generally low. It's the fallout that gets you, hours or days later. Even then, the risk is acute poisoning, not so much long-term cancer risk.
Something like a fifth of the American population will die of cancer, without ever having worked on the Manhattan population.
* Richard Hamming's "You and Your Research" http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
* Gian-Carlo Rota's "Ten Lessons I wish I had been Taught" http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/gian-carlo-rota-10-le...
P.S. Ciao Pino! :)
If you're there over Thanksgiving, say hi.
Also off of the scientific tangent: If you find yourself in a hot tub with a beautiful nude and no idea what to say, compare poetry to liquid thermodynamics. "Rock Star" doesn't begin to cover it.
Having never seen this before is perfectly reasonable if you're new.
My point is that age is irrelevant. "Newness" may be, but that doesn't imply age.
In the proud tradition of founders generally solving problems that mostly affect themselves rather than the rest of the population, I propose the startup idea of a hackers bookshelf startup. Not the first time its been tried, its a hard problem which means its a good startup topic.
[1] https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=cargo+...